Christina Kubisch – Audiopanoramas

In dialogue with Christina Kubisch over some years, Ultima’s artistic director Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen developed the initial idea of an Electrical Walks website. One central idea was to transform the Electrical Walks in the city to the virtual walks Oslo online.

To realize this project, the team of Christina Kubisch, Ecki Güter, Frank Paul and Tom Thiel visited Oslo in May 2019. They filmed, photographed and recorded acoustic and electromagnetic sounds at 40+ different places within the city, from tourist hotspots to remote stations, from cultural highlights to hidden corners, from the harbour to the central station. Frank Paulused a special photographic technique, where fisheye images are stitched to an equirectangular projection which can be viewed as a 360° panorama. The electromagnetic waves were recorded with the custom made special induction headphones designed by Christina Kubisch.

You are invited to discover a different und unknown Oslo, where the hidden electromagnetic life of the city suddenly becomes audible.

The sounds are much more varied and musical than you might expect. There are complex layers of high and low frequencies, loops of rhythmic sequences, groups of tiny signals, complex layers of pitches, long drones and many elements which change constantly and are hard to describe. Some sounds are much alike all over the world. Others are specific to a city or country and cannot be found anywhere else. Explore the electromagnetic sound archive, providing recordings from all over the planet.

The video gives an impression of what you experience when you move through electromagnetic fields while wearing christina Kubisch’s custom made special induction headphones.